Lifeboat Foundation

But I am a visionary by the most grounded, neutral definition of the word (and so are you, undoubtedly):

By this definition, a “visionary” is just a person who regularly envisions the future and feels a deep need to design it with care, at times with such compulsive passion that it risks defining one on a core level and consuming one with endless details of a reality which has yet to formally occur.

In my inner midnight rambles, when this archetype is in full moonlit bloom, I envision our little enclave of ultra-talented, idiosyncratic, fun-loving Austin artist family winding up in some kind of post-apocalyptic village together, almost as if we’ve been training our entire lives for this…

Continue reading “The Tesseract, Part I” »

That’s 25 times faster, at 80 percent the cost of conventional means.

Combating climate change and biodiversity loss is a complicated matter, causing prolonged and perhaps tedious conversations. But what if there was a cooler way to achieve all that?

Enter Australian start-up AirSeed Technology and their swarms of seed-firing drones that are planting 40,000 trees a day to fight deforestation. The company and its incredible technology were featured Wednesday on * Euro Green News*. drone that can plant 40,000 trees a day could be essential in fighting deforestation.

The giant bee was first discovered in 1,859, but since has only officially sighted once. Now, researchers have found a specimen alive and well.

Circa 2020

Researchers have created a new 3D printing technique that could replace traditional 3D printers that take far to long to create desired objects.

The problem with traditional 3D printers is that they work in horizontal layers. This process is the bane of 3D printing, as it means that, depending on the size of the object, it will take time to construct. What if the printer could build the entire model all at once, instead of layer-by-layer? Researchers from Switzerland’s Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have done just that with their new invention.

Continue reading “Light-based 3D printing technique prints full objects in just seconds” »

A virtual robot arm has learned to solve a wide range of different puzzles —stacking blocks, setting the table, arranging chess pieces—without having to be retrained for each task. It did this by playing against a second robot arm that was trained to give it harder and harder challenges.

Self play: Developed by researchers at OpenAI, the identical robot arms—Alice and Bob—learn by playing a game against each other in a simulation, without human input. The robots use reinforcement learning, a technique in which AIs are trained by trial and error what actions to take in different situations to achieve certain goals. The game involves moving objects around on a virtual tabletop. By arranging objects in specific ways, Alice tries to set puzzles that are hard for Bob to solve. Bob tries to solve Alice’s puzzles. As they learn, Alice sets more complex puzzles and Bob gets better at solving them.